Archive for the 'Crimean Tatars' Category

This is an extract from the original draft of Dream Land, which never made it to the published version. Like everything in the book, it’s a fictionalised combination of several first-hand accounts of the years of exile after all the Crimean Tatars were deported in 1944.

I’ve sadly lost the notes and recordings that made up the research for the book. I remember three people who were sources for this particular story, all then living in Bakhchisaray with children and grandchildren. The last of them died last year.

It’s a sort of physical anguish when people go forever taking their memories with them, leaving behind we who were preoccupied or absent-minded or reluctant to listen and record them when we could. Today, 18 May, is the anniversary of the deportation. I’ve been reading accounts of Crimean Tatars about 1944; the memories that map onto and create newer memories; the things that remain, the things that are passed on, the things that are lost.

Guli didn’t know exactly how old she was. When we would all get together to talk through our memories, keep the soul of Crimea alive, she always said she’d been four or five when we were all deported. She hated it that she couldn’t remember anything about the land we left behind. “It’s like a dream,” was all she’d say. “Like things in a dream.” The one thing she said she remembered was apples. In Guli’s dream the apples of Crimea were the biggest and reddest and sweetest in the world. The blossoming trees in spring, tall as mountains covered with white snow.

Her three brothers were at the front in 1944. She only ever saw one of them again. The cattle trucks took the remaining three children and their mother along with hundreds of other Crimean Tatars to the Ural mountains. Barefoot, in light spring frocks, and they ended up at a labour camp in the wilderness on the edge of Siberia. That winter in 1944 came early. It was so cold; everyone slept in the barracks tight-packed in a line like sardines, and in the night if someone wanted to turn over he had to wake up the whole line of women and boys and old people and children, and they all turned over together.

They were cold and they starved. Six hundred grammes of sour black bread was the daily ration, and that only for workers – not the old people, nor the children. Later they wereallotted rooms, one for each family, and one night Guli cried and cried and cried for her empty belly. She was only five or six and she had hardly learned to speak; some of the others thought she was backwards, maybe even a bit daft. The wooden partitions were so thin, you could hear everything; when Guli had cried for three hours without stopping the wife of the camp commandercame in.

“Shut the child up! I’ve got visitors staying from the district and they can’t sleep because of her whining.”

“She’s hungry!” Guli’s mother replied. “How can I shut her up when I’ve got nothing to give her to eat?”

The wife went back cursing and swearing, and Guli went on crying. And then a little later one of the commander’s guests came sleepily through the door, carrying a chunk of bread and a lump of sugar on the top of it. “There now, eat it and calm down, child.”

Oh but the whole family were so hungry! And none of them would take food from the littlest, but they sat in a circle around Guli, like dogs round a butcher’s shop door, begging. “Give me a piece, Guli. Just a little piece. Share it with me, Guli. Just a corner. Just a nibble. A crumb. Please Guli. Give me a bit. There’s a good girl.”

And little backward Guli, who never said anything at all, looked at them and said as clear as you please, “No, I won’t give you any, because I cried and I cried and I cried this piece of bread all by myself!”

When their mother died it was so cold that the body froze solid. The oldest sister went outside to scrape up snow to wash the body, but the middle sister had the idea to pretend the woman was still alive, so they could get her food ration. They kept it up for three days, chewing on black bread under the frozen eye of their mama. On the fourth day a doctor came to see what was keeping the woman so sick she couldn’t work. He found the three girls wrapped together in all the clothes and blankets they had, warming their hands round a candle, and the body sat up stiffly in bed all blue and ghastly.

“Mama’s caught a cold so bad she can’t eat, she can’t get out of bed,” Guli explained.

Well, they took her away after that but the ground was frozen so solid they couldn’t dig a grave, so they just left her lying outside until the thaw.

About ten years later Guli and her sisters were transfered to Uzbekistan, to the Hungry Steppe, to work digging irrigation channels for cotton. We came from neighbouring villages in Crimea, but it was in the Hungry Steppe labour camps that I met Guli. She was no beauty, and she could barely read or write. But I was hardly one to talk, by then. I had got malaria from the mosquitoes that came after we irrigated the salt flats. My skin stuck to my bones, yellow as old cheese from the medicine. I shivered even in the heat of August, I was unable to eat, I hardly knew where I was, Icouldn’t stir from my bed and I had no family left by then to help me.

Guli had never seen malaria, but she knew all about the cold. Because I wouldn’t stop shivering she brought her blanket and climbed into the bed with me and put her arms round me to warm me.

Her name meant ‘rose’. When I told her that she went pink as a rose but not with pleasure. “I’ve just got prickles,” she said. She was ashamed because she hadn’t known. She never did learn much reading or writing, she could swear like a soldier in Russian but she didn’t know much Crimean Tatar. I often made her feel stupid, and she knew she wasn’t pretty. But after they built a town where once was the Hungry Steppe and called it Gulistan, rose garden, she said, “They’ve named it after me, the nerve of it, the bastards never even asked.”

She was short-tempered and out-of-breath and she died when our son Alim was 18 and just getting interested in the Crimean Tatar National Movement. Alim brought home a girl he’d met on his first protest march and Guli didn’t approve.

“I don’t know what you see in her,” she complained, because the girl wasn’t pretty, had no family to speak of, couldn’t cook, talked of nothing but the protests. Alim was a handsome, clever boy, and Guli wanted a better bride for her son than she had been for me. But Alim was smitten. Soon he could talk of nothing but Crimea too, and I suppose Guli felt like she had lost both of us.

She was jealous of my memories of the Crimea we left behind. The stories I tell now to my granddaughter Safi started with my wife; I wanted to give them to Guli as a present, like one day I hoped to give her a real Crimean apple. But she knew there were things I never told her, perhaps she had heard them as I lay in her arms delirious with the fever. When she collapsed and they took her off to the hospital, the doctor said she had a hole in her heart. I came to see her and she patted my hand and said, “There you are then. There’s a surprise. I always thought you were the one with a hole in your heart.”

Labels for Crimean apples and pears exported by the USSR in the 1930s (in Simferopol museum)

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It feels as though everything has stopped, as governments tell us only the essential things should carry on in public – food supply and delivery, health care, dog-walking… We work out for ourselves what is essential, in terms of living our lives in more or less public spaces without putting ourselves and other people at risk too much.

While actually everything hasn’t stopped at all, as governments have such a strange idea of what is actually essential. Arrests in Russian-annexed Crimea for ‘terrorism’ and related court hearings, for instance, have been deemed essential to continue. The latest three arrests were on 11 March.

Think about it: unknown people invading your home, the place we’re all supposed to retreat to now to keep ourselves and others safe, and dragging you from it to share an utterly confined space which is crowded to the locked doors and tiny broken windows with other people, with lice, with violence, disease, neglect. To join those in pre-trial prison already for months and years on the same charges, who are still having appeals for house arrest turned down.

Court hearings in Rostov grind on, now closed to relatives and journalists, how convenient for keeping this whole ludicrous evidence-free process going with less transparency or accountability than ever. One accused, Server Mustafayev, has symptoms typical of COVID-19 – a high temperature, a cough. The Russian penal system still insists he appear in court.

We’re all being told to stay at home, and we’re worrying about feeling confined, bored, cramped, lonely; cabin fever; loss of income, of freedom; social and physical distance; a little piece of our lives take away from us. All these men who have never committed or called for an act of armed violence have been taken out of their homes and forcibly confined in unbearably close proximity to hundreds of others; no income; no family and friends; no internet; no occupation; next to no sanitary and healthcare provision. Years of their lives taken away.

At a hearing last week – when they were still open to relatives – the wife of one of the accused was charged for violating regulations after she went into the court building with a piece of paper on which she’d written to him: ‘I need you like I need the air’.

We all need air to breathe, that’s clear of disinformation and fear and selfishness and injustice. We all need other people, we need love like we need the air.

The happiness of arriving in Bakhchisaray, the old Crimean Tatar capital of Crimea, and turning down the path round the side of the Khan’s palace to the Usta crafts centre and there would be Ayder aga in his jeweller’s workshop.

Coffee in a jezver heated over a bunsen burner to drink; sweets to eat; all the beautiful filigree things he made to look at. And the talk. The wonderful, wonderful talk, about Bakhchisaray before 1944 full of workshops and fountains; about Uzbekistan and exile: the hungry steppe with its taste of salt on the wind, the faсtory where he was sent to work as a machinist for thirty years; about coming home to Crimea and working as a tractor driver and wedding musician. And all that time somehow his hands remembering the traditional Crimean Tatar skills of filigree silverwork that he’d learned from his father before he was seventeen and deported along with all the Crimean Tatars.

Ayder aga revived those skills single-handedly at home and in the Usta centre in Crimea, when he was already 70, and passed them on to his daughter and granddaughter and to a new generation of jewellers. He passed on some kind of spirit of old Bakhchisaray as well, I always felt, and the history and the stories too, and the jokes. These, lit by his humour and wit, his amazing love of life, and knowledge and kindness, are things I’ll treasure forever.

The picture of Ayder aga’s work, and of himself in his workshop, are from the Ukrainian edition of Dream Land. Many of his stories made it into the book; the character of the grandfather is of course partly inspired by him (although I never managed to capture his humorousness and the sheer variety of his life in all its hardships and joys).

The Usta workshop passed into history in 2017, now Ayder Asanov has as well. I feel so blessed that I knew him.

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“This is my father’s house. They came at five in the morning on 18th May: three Soviet soldiers burst in with guns. It’s just the same as now. They come in the night or the early morning, when you’re asleep and you’re not prepared, you can’t understand what’s happening…

Back then, it was still wartime. Dad was 12 in 1944 and he remembers: all the men had been mobilised in 1941 and sent away, so that when the Germans came in 1942 there were only women and old people and children who grew up for two years under the Germans. The boys, 16, 17 years old, were all put into German uniform; they were taken from their homes and given German uniforms in return for flour and sugar, or else they were told if they didn’t wear it their families would be shot. They had little choice.

When the Soviets took back Crimea pilots were flying over and shot through his house roof. Dad remembered when he came back to Crimea in the 1970s he saw the same bullet holes still there in the roof, covered over with stones. When people asked how he knew which house was his, he said: it’s the one with the bullet holes, and they let him in to look at it. But they never let him have the house back. I’ve never even been inside the courtyard.

Instead when we came back in 1993 dad fought to get an official land plot to build a new house. He always insisted on doing everything according to the law. We lived in a damp container for three years, we all got hepatitis. Me and my brother built the house together with our parents. I was 15, my brother was 17.

This isn’t just our story; practically every Crimean Tatar went through this. No one helped us, no one gave us jobs or land or rights. At school when kids pointed at us we had to say: we’re not immigrants overrunning Crimea, we’ve come home. People were scared that we’d demand our houses and property back, but in fact none of us had documents to prove ownership, because we’d had to leave in such a hurry in 1944. We were sent away as traitors and forced to live in reservations behind barbed wire, having to sign in and out, like we were under house arrest…

Our father was born in 1932. He died in June 2015. My brother’s detention destroyed him. He only lived for two months after that. He was so strong, but the disappointment, what they did to his son, ate up his strength, he just dried up and crumbled away in front of our eyes… After they tried to kidnap my brother, and then beat him up and detained him, dad went to the Russian security services in Yalta. It was a young officer who until 2014 was serving under Ukraine’s security service. Dad said: aren’t you ashamed? He called him a fascist. The officer pretended it was nothing to do with him and it wasn’t his fault…

My father was asked to collaborate with the authorities in Soviet times. He refused. He went to prison for two years; he was in the Crimean Tatar national movement but they couldn’t prove that so they arrested him for hooliganism. Then in 2015 they came to my brother at work before and after they detained him for the first time. They said: we need you, you have to work with us. My brother refused, just as my father had refused even though they offered many times. They said: if you won’t help us then you’ll go to prison. My brother was a human rights defender, he was trying to find out what had happened to the Crimean Tatars who have gone missing since 2014. They couldn’t arrest him for working in human rights or for refusing to cooperate with them, so they arrested him for terrorism. They’ve got no witnesses, no victims, no case. All they have is the desire to put him in prison. And they found a way to put him there, just as they did with our father…

What my father wanted most was autonomy and rehabilitation for the Crimean Tatars, because this stain against us as supposed traitors from 1944 has never been removed. He wanted full rehabilitation, not just a signed piece of paper but restoration of all our property and rights. And when Putin really did sign a law on rehabilitation in 2014, for a short time he was actually as happy as a child. He said that in two months Russia had done what Ukraine had not done in 20 years.

But other than a piece of paper that says we are not traitors, there is nothing. Now my brother is in prison, and my father is dead.”

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Five years ago today Reshat Ametov was buried in Crimea. His body had been found near a village called Wild Strawberry and another called Russian. He’d been tortured over ten days before being killed. Now around the anniversary of his death his last Facebook post pops up in my time-line, ghost-fashion: Going on Monday to the Cabinet of Ministers to stand in protest. Have you got the guts???

And the video keeps showing up. Shot in central Simferopol on that Monday, 3rd March 2014, it shows Reshat standing alone in front of Russian soldiers in unmarked uniform guarding the Crimean Cabinet of Ministers. Passersby, journalists and camouflage-clad members of the ‘Crimean self-defence’ mill around; police sirens wail. For over an hour, Reshat Ametov just stands there. He doesn’t say or do anything. He hasn’t even got a protest sign. Then some of the men in camouflage take him to a black car and drive him away.

The people who saw him alive after that, who are clearly visible in the film, and the people who killed him, have not been charged. It’s as if they didn’t do anything, just as Reshat didn’t do anything.

Reshat’s brother Refat talked to me once about Don Quixote when he described Reshat. Honestly, he sounds a bit impossible in ordinary, peaceful times, always picking up on obscure laws and regulations and trying to get them implemented because he was so sure he had the right, and this was the way the world should be. And when the times stopped being ordinary and peaceful, he went and stood there by the cabmin “because he was convinced he had a right to. Why didn’t he have a right to be there? He’d always had that right,” Refat said. “You know Don Quixote tilting at windmills. It was something like that.”

I never knew Reshat. I feel Refat is a bit quixotic though, the way he’s doggedly trying to bring those people who killed his brother to justice, after five years of nothing happening to further the investigation in Russian-ruled Crimea. Five years of the myth of the Crimean Spring when never a drop of blood was shed as Crimea ‘returned’ to Russia.

I think about Reshat and Refat whenever I see photos of single pickets, which is the only way people in Crimea can still register their protest (Russian bans any kind of group meeting or demonstration that isn’t in support of the authorities, and has detained people for having unsanctioned football matches or carrying ‘unsanctioned flying devices’ – otherwise known as balloons). A single picket is where you stand alone somewhere holding a sign saying, for example, Crimean Tatars are not extremists. Such picketers have been detained and fined; it is now apparently a extremist offence to say that you’re not an extremist.

Reshat Ametov didn’t even do that of course, he didn’t even have a sign.

You can read Don Quixote as comedy, as tragedy, as social commentary, as metafiction and even fake news – in book 2, (fictional) Quixote sets forth on new adventures in order to debunk a fake (real work of fiction by a rival author) Quixote.

You can read in it the wonderful, awful ability of people to create their own reality in the face of violence, ridicule, disbelief, historical memory, international law, common sense and facts on the ground.

You could call ‘Crimean Spring’ quixotic, in that sense. The adherents of Crimea Spring are fortunate though: all local information channels and most facts on the ground in Crimea do everything to confirm their reality, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.

For quixotic people like the Ametovs it’s harder. These are people desperately trying to live in one reality when everything around tells them they are living in another. There are lots of them in Crimea. Mostly they stay at home, talking to their families and to a dwindling circle of acquaintances they can trust. They’ve turned their backs on any kind of public, civic life, because there is no place for this in Crimea anymore. Their reality, where there is international law, where there are alternative narratives, where there is justice for the disappeared and the murdered, and simply the possibility to stand in silent protest, gets smaller and smaller.

I remember what a Crimean Tatar told me in 2015, back when he still thought he could play a public, civic role in Crimea. “If I say what I think they’ll put me in prison or exile me,” he said. “So I’ve learned to control not just my words, but my thoughts.”

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on a Crimean Tatar gate in Stariy Krym, Crimea. (Cervantes metafictionally alleged that the story of Don Quixote was originally written by the Muslim author Cide Hamete Benengeli).

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“Our grandfather was a Red Army hero. He had all these medals, the Red Star for undaunted bravery and everything. And he was on leave at home in Crimea in May 1944. He was with my grandmother and one son, staying in Yevpatoria, while the other two children were somewhere else. My uncle, the son who was there, told us all this. There was this knock at the gate at five in the morning on 18th May. My grandfather didn’t like to hurry to do anything – it must be where I get it from. He shouted ‘Coming, coming!’ and he was getting up and putting on his clothes, and by that time they’d climbed over the gate, these soldiers, and were in the yard and knocking on the door. And it opened and there he was standing in his army uniform and all his medals. They didn’t know what to do. They’d been told there were only women and children in the house, and instead here was this decorated army officer. So they said he should go to the commandant. He went and explained he was on leave, and the commandant said he should go straight back to the front.

“Khartbaba went back home and said he was going to the front. And then – our uncle told us – there was this huge row and scandal with bitay [grandmother], it went on for about two hours, and the end of it was that they both got taken away into exile with the son, our uncle. The other two children were put in another railway wagon, and ended up in a completely different place. That’s a whole other story. My grandfather did find them again in Uzbekistan, they were living on a rubbish dump. He found them just in time, they were dying of hunger.”

This is a Second World War memorial in Koreiz, on the south Crimean coast, to local men who fough in the Red Army. Most of the names on it, repeating over and over, are Crimean Tatar.

It was built on the initiative of a Crimean Tatar man with the same surname as one on the monument, after he returned in the 1990s to the town from which his family was exiled on 18 May 1944. Nearby, the family house is still standing; it belongs now to a Russian family.

The man had two sons. One of them showed me this memorial, and the historic mosque which was also rebuilt on his father’s initiative, and his father’s grave – he died in 2016, disillusioned with Russia that had awarded him a medal ‘For the return of Crimea’ in 2014, and then harassed and beaten and imprisoned his other son.

The other son has been in remand prison for more than two years, and is now on trial in Russia along with five other men charged with ‘attempting to overthrow the state’ and belonging to a ‘terrorist’ Muslim organisation. At a recent hearing one of the secret witnesses on whose evidence the entire prosecution is based, revealed his name. He said he had never met half the men on trial and had no evidence to think that the others, who he did know, were involved in the organisation. The trial continues.

These are commemorative 10-rouble coins issued by Russia after what it calls the ‘reunification’ of Crimea in 2014. They were given to me by two Russian women from Simferopol, the capital city of Crimea. They said, their voices chiming and interrupting and agreeing, ending each other’s sentences, repeating the same phrases:

“I’ve got nothing against Tatars, you can meet very good ones, I adore them, but we were scared on 18 May when they marked the deportation every year… If it hadn’t been for Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] the Tatars would have just destroyed us, it would have been the most terrible thing on the whole planet… They all came here [to Simferopol], it was awful, they said such strange things about Russia, it was such a stressful situation, all you’d need to do is light a match and it would all go up. Every year… On 18 May we couldn’t go out because they were coming and we were afraid because they were everywhere, it was terrible, every year, we were afraid even to go to school… Not anymore. Now it’s all civilised. They have their monuments and sacred places where they are allowed to go, they can go to mosque; they [the authorities] are building them such a beautiful mosque now… They live very well, some of them live better than us. We’re tolerant to everyone, our marriages are all mixed, Russian and Ukrainian, we’re all mixed and how can you divide us now? … No one is violating their rights, it’s not true what they say. They have everything, they have cultural centres and schools, they get given more because they were deported and they’re to be pitied… It’s us who get nothing special. We can manage, it’s our home and we should help and accept everyone, that’s what we were taught.”

The ‘Crimean Marathon’ is a grassroots campaign in Crimea collecting 10 rouble coins like these the women gave me, by the bucketload, to support the (overwhelmingly) Crimean Tatar people imprisoned or fined since annexation for ‘unsanctioned meetings’, ‘inciting inter-ethnic hatred’, ‘resisting legitimate force by law enforcement,’ ‘extremism’, ‘questioning the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation’, etc, etc. The latest person likely to be in need of those 10 rouble coins has just been arrested at a memorial meeting for the 18th May deportation; a meeting that these two women would have approved of, no longer in the city centre (where they were held until 2014) but next to the mosque in an entirely Crimean Tatar suburb on the very edge of Simferopol. ‘Their monuments and sacred places where they are allowed to go’.

This is a well in a wild, empty valley near Bakhchisaray in Crimea. It’s all that’s left of the Crimean Tatar village of Adym Chokrak (Many Springs), that was emptied of people on 18 May 1944, and later bulldozed. Because of the clean, cold water it’s now quite a popular place for wild camping for people who mostly have little awareness and less interest in its history.

Last week on 9 May millions of people in Russia and former Soviet states joined ‘immortal regiment’ marches, commemorating the Soviet victory in World War 2. With each year that the war gets further and further away, more and more people turn out on these marches. They march in identical crowds holding identical placards: the black and white faces of millions of people who killed or died or disappeared or got medals or were deported or deported others or made a black market fortune or lost everything or fell in love or were raped or told magnificent war stories or never, ever talked about the war.

They marched in Chechnya, without a mention of the Chechens deported in 1944, or a single picture of the thousands who died and disappeared in two more recent wars with Russian forces. They marched in Crimea, and dressed up their children in Red Army hats, and wore the same striped ribbons worn by modern fighters waging a senseless war against children of the same Red Army soldiers in mainland Ukraine. They repeated identical phrases about solidarity and patriotism and pride in their ancestors.

In Russian-annexed Crimea you’re actively encouraged to mention the war. But only if you remember it in the right way.

Today, 18 May, is the day the Soviet NKVD and Red Army deported the Crimean Tatars, the Greeks, the Bulgarians and the Germans from Crimea in 1944, for alleged collaboration with the Nazis. There aren’t any marches in Crimea today to commemorate this event. Instead there are police cars and FSB (the successor to the NKVD/KGB), anonymous denunciations and warnings from the prosecutors office that any public action today may be considered an extremist or terrorist offence.

Crimean myth-making: 2016 site in Simferopol for a monument ‘for innocent victims of terrorism, and security and law enforcement agency staff who lost their lives in the line of duty in the fight against terrorism’

One of the aspects of the deportation I still find hardest to grasp is the men and women from these ethnic groups who were fighting in the Red Army in 1944. At the same time as they were at last becoming victorious heroes, who will go on to become black-and-white faces in ‘immortal regiment’ marches, their families were deported as traitors – even they themselves were deported for treason, when the war was over and they were of no more use as soldiers.

The same authorities that needed them as heroes to win a war then, and still needs them now, also needed them and needs them still to be the villains, fifth columnists, extremists and terrorists.

I can imagine the deportation, I think, sort of and inadequately. But my imagination fails when it comes to a man from a Red Army regiment whose family disappears in Soviet-liberated Crimea while he fights all the way to Berlin. How did he feel? How could he bear it? How could he keep wearing that uniform and follow orders and be so obedient?

I tried to retell this story – one of several told to me in Crimea – in Dream Land; here’s the excerpt although I don’t think it’s a very succesful part of the book, because actually I simply can’t imagine it.

“Did you go up on Mangup-Kalye? What did you find?”

“A cemetery,” Safi said glumly. She didn’t really want to be reminded of those tombstones, mossy and tumbled on their cold carpet of flowers.

…“My best friend once came looking for my grave there there,” grandpa said… “My friend Ayder came from the war to find us, but he was too late, and we had all gone.

“[Ayder] defended the Soviet Union against the Germans. Alongside him fought Russians and Chechens, Ukrainians and Uzbeks, Azeris and Armenians. It didn’t matter. They were all from the Soviet Union. They all wanted the same thing: to get the German fascists out of their country so they could return to their families; to stay alive.

“Ayder was in Azerbaijan with his unit when an Azeri officer, a Muslim like him, said he should go back to Crimea as fast as he could. He said he’d heard something about the Crimean Tatars, and he’d help Ayder get leave to go home before it was too late. But he didn’t say what it might be too late for.

“It was June 1944; Crimea had just been liberated from the Germans when Ayder arrived, met by the smell of roses. The flags welcoming the returning Red Army hung limp in the streets. Everywhere walls were shattered by bullets and bombs. From lamp posts dangled the stiff, dry bodies of collaborators.”

… “At his mother’s house in Akmesjit, the door was locked. Next door was empty too. There were no Tatar children playing in the yard. It was as if they had all stepped out for something, and if he waited they would come back. But he did wait, and no one came. Ayder was wearing his uniform, which made him look like any other soldier defending the Soviet Union, but the Russians and Ukrainians avoided his eye, and hurried away when he approached. All through the city was the same. The Tatar houses stood deserted; when he peered through the windows he could see the kind of mess people leave when they are in a hurry and expect to be back soon to tidy up.

“My friend thought perhaps the Tatars had fled the fighting and gone to the villages for refuge. So he came out here, to Adym-Chokrak. But here too, all he found was empty houses and silence, and up on Mangup-Kalye he found a cemetery. It wasn’t a Tatar cemetery, but there was nowhere else to look, nowhere else we could be. Ayder searched there for his family, for my grave, my mother’s grave, the graves of all the vanished Crimean Tatars.”

The silence of those narrow stone beds up on the hillside. Imagine the silence of a whole village emptied of people, the beds in the houses unslept in and stony cold. Safi wished more than ever that they’d never found the graveyard.

“But you weren’t buried there, Khartbaba,” she said.

“No. And it was our Karaim neighbour who told Ayder what had happened… Old Gulnara Tata tended the graveyard on Mangup, even though no one remembers who is buried there any more. She found my friend there, crying as he searched, and she told him, ‘They took all the Crimean Tatars away. Red Army soldiers, like you. Some people say they drowned them in the Caspian Sea, or took them to Siberia.’

… “Ayder had nothing but his army uniform and his soldier’s papers. He went back to his unit, and a few months later he was sent west to the Front. He was with the Red Army when it marched into Berlin.

…“He had always thought he was the same as all the other soldiers, wanting only to free their homeland and return to their families. But while he’d been struggling to stay alive, the Soviets had taken away his homeland and given it to the Russians,” grandpa said. “After the war, he too was exiled to Uzbekistan. He kept on searching, and in 1950 he found me and my mother. His own family vanished for ever. He never even found their graves.”

Karaim graves, Bakhchisaray, Crimea

Here is a first-hand account of a similar, even more shocking story. Note the tone – no blame, no anger, no analysis either from the narrator or from anyone within his narration (other than an Odessan Jew who wraps up his response in a metaphor about black smoke) – just a kind of matter-of-fact numbness. It reads to me like the testimony of a person still, decades later, in total shock.

“They gave us shovels, and we dug holes in the ground, erecting the posts and enclosing the area with barbed wire. Thus we imprisoned ourselves, surrounded by barbed wire.”

In these stories I think you can read the whole human trauma of the Soviet Union, which taught its people to obey and admire the thing that destroyed them, and feel proud and patriotic to belong to a black-and-white story commemorated with millions of black-and-white faces, while the shades of grey and unbearable darkness are banished now as then by police cars and security services, prosecutors notices and anonymous denunciations and arrests.

Well – all that is left of the Crimean Tatar village of Adym- Chokrak. After the inhabitants were deported in 1944 the village was bulldozed.

(On a side note, long ago when I started asking in Crimea about the Crimean Tatar deportation I was struck by the similarity between the Russian word for traitor (predatel’) and for legend or tale (predanie). I presume – a philologist can put me right – they come from the same root as peredat’, to give or pass on, but on the level of historical memory and myth-making in Crimea it still strikes me as very strangely and ironically apt.)